Scrambled World
Date: 2020-12-29T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction

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Title: Scrambled World

Author: Basil Wells

Release date: December 29, 2020 [eBook #64172]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCRAMBLED WORLD ***

Redskins! Boston tealeggers! Jeep men! Time
traveler Devin Orth clutched his temples,
battling insanity. Some "genius" had waved
a wand over Terran history and produced a—

Scrambled World

By BASIL WELLS

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The sun was dying. About its sullen shadow-streaked red globe thousands of miniature artificial worlds clustered like a swarm of night-chilled midges. So thickly did they hug the great globe of dulling flame that it seemed Sol had acquired an outer husk of interlocked asteroids and moonlets.

Of all the planets and their satellites only Earth remained—a shrunken and changed planet. And Earth too had shifted its orbit until it now swung but a few million miles from its molten primary.

In the huge ovoid of metal that was the Time Bubble the three men making up its crew had by now grown accustomed to the changes that three million years had brought to the solar system. They had expected great changes—and found them. This was to be their first stop in their time quest for an efficient shield against the deadly radiations of atomic disintegration's side effects.

Devin Orth, the lean, dark-haired young scientist sharing the control blister with his employer and friend, Norris Horn, studied the expanding green wilderness of what had once been northern Ohio. He turned to the big bald man in whose brain the plans for the time spanner had been born.

"The continents are there," he said unbelieving, "almost exactly as we left them. And yet Earth is smaller. Its diameter has dwindled more than a thousand miles!"

Horn's broad thick body quivered as he loosed a volcanic chuckle.

"I know," he said. "And the oceans, big though they are, are probably very shallow. A thousand feet at the most. Water will be growing precious."

"But," puzzled Orth, "why are there no cities and why have the continents changed so little? Surely three million years...."

"I'd say the inhabitants of those small globes near the sun," suggested Horn, "are descendants of Earthmen. They have used their superb command of science to make of Earth a beautiful park or preserve as it was in our own primitive age.

"Surely, if they have such knowledge, they can give us the secret of atomic control that will overcome the sterility threatening mankind. We cannot return now to the limited culture afforded by the lesser power-sources of coal or gas without great damage to civilization—perhaps its utter downfall."

"They have it all right," said Orth, scowling down at the open parklike meadow toward which Horn was blasting, "but I'm worried about getting back. So far this time travel is simply negation—outside the Time Bubble three million years pass and to us it seems less than two hours."

Horn thrummed the landing jets smoothly and laughed his deep booming bellow. The grassy glade came up to meet them.

"A minor detail," he said as he cut the jets and the ship jolted abruptly to an uneven grounding. The deck was slightly tilted and from below there sounded a muffled explosion.

"You all right, Neilson?" shouted Orth into the intercom.

The third member of their crew sounded breathless as he answered from the power compartment.

"Thought the mixer was going for a bit," he gasped. "A forward jet went kafoo. Boulder maybe blocking off that last blast."

Orth told Horn what Neilson had said. The big man unzipped his safety harness and came over to his side, his big capable hand on Orth's shoulder.

"Don't worry about getting home," he said, taking up the thread of conversation the explosion had disrupted. "In three million years all the secrets of time and matter will have been discovered. We'll return with the shield."

He released the young scientist's bruised shoulder and slapped a great paw of a hand on his back, pushing him down toward the airlock.

"Better replace that jet tip, Devin," he said. "Can't tell but we may have to take off in a hurry. This future civilization might be unfriendly and," he paused thoughtfully, "even non-humanoid."

Orth checked the gauges at the lock and found the outer atmosphere to be a heady oxygen-rich mixture. Horn had gone down to help Neilson in the power compartment and he was alone. He stuffed the jet tip into his bag of tools and pushed through the inner port into the airlock. There he snapped on the invisible, but oddly tingling, radiations that would destroy any alien spores of deadly growth that might find their way into the ship.

He swung open the thick oval outer door and dropped the short grounding ladder to the blast-blackened turf. Down the eight rigid metal rungs of the ladder he went to the ground. He stumbled awkwardly and almost fell. The unaccustomed gravity, after the past twelve days in space—twelve days that had actually been thirty thousand centuries—had tricked him.

A moment later his muscles had quickly remedied this unbalance and he found the fused jet that had blown back. As Neilson had guessed, the Time Bubble had grazed a boulder in landing and the expanding rocket gases' escape had been blocked off.

It was good to feel the spring of turf underfoot. Even the feeble warmth of the ancient sun was pleasant on his bared flesh. He had not realized how homesick he had grown for Earth until now.

He put down his tools and headed toward a clump of oddly-shaped trees near the forest's rim. As he neared them he whistled. The temperature of the Lakes region must have changed. They were palms!

It was only then that he turned to look back at the Time Bubble. He was thinking that Horn would be interested in his discovery of this tropical growth so far north.

His eyes blinked stupidly. He blinked again.

The Time Bubble's ugly ovoid of space-scarred metal was gone!

Several hours had passed since the space ship's uncanny disappearance. The Earthman was picking his way along a narrow game trail in the semi-twilight of the mighty forest that crowded close up to Lake Erie's shoreline.

Caution had impelled him to seek safety in the wilderness until the truth about the spacer's disappearance was revealed.

The trail cut across a rock-strewn highway, deeply-rutted by wheeled vehicles. Just across the way, half-hidden by a tangle of wild vines and brush, was a small log cabin. Smoke oozed slowly skyward from its mud-daubed stick chimney.

The odor of cooking meat sent Orth trotting hungrily across the road. He had forgotten any possible danger until an arrow hissed viciously past his ear. He dropped forward on his belly in a shallow depression soggy with dead leaves. A second arrow thwocked lightly through the gray-barked tangle of brush that his head was ramming into.

His fingers went to the flat pocket machine gun that all three scientists aboard the Time Bubble carried. This weapon, complete with ten thousand tiny explosive cartridges, and a compact kit of tools and essential equipment, they carried with them at all times when away from the space ship.

Behind a light gray shaft of scaly bark, a huge tree's bole, something red moved. His machine gun slapped a dozen needle-sized slugs at the half-seen target. The explosions splintered and ripped at the tree's thick trunk. The red thing leaped clear, yelling. Before Devin could stop his weapon, it stepped into several small incredibly bright explosions.

Before Devin could stop firing, the thing leaped clear, yelling.

Then, from the cabin, a broad-shouldered young man emerged. He was clad somewhat after the fashion of the early American pioneers: fur cap, shapeless brown homespun shirt, rough skinny-legged trousers, and thick-soled moccasins. In his hands he lifted a cumbersome weapon, having six wooden barrels or tubes, from each of which protruded a sharp-pointed metal dart.

"There been trouble?" he cried out in badly mangled but understandable English.

For an instant Orth was stunned by the wonder of it. After three million years—a man speaking English!

"Shot at me from over there," he told the frontiersman warily.

The man catfooted over to the scarred tree, his clumsy weapon poised ready. He grunted something in badly garbled English. Then he motioned to the Earthman to join him.

"Redskin," he told Orth.

The hairy apelike savage crouching in bloody death behind the tree was indeed clad in flapping, red-dyed garments of skin. His skin, however, was as white beneath its matted covering of black hair as Orth's own. Yet the other had called the savage a redskin.

As Orth watched the tall young giant stamped his foot down on the fallen warrior's middle, shook the long chestnut hair out of his handsome brown face, and opening his mouth let out a prolonged hideous screech. As he did so his fists hammered drumlike on his distended chest.

From the distance a hideous snarling and trumpeting answered the ear-splitting sound. The man grinned at Orth and nodded toward the forest. He stepped down and held up two fingers.

"Vello," he said, continuing to make the V sign that first saw birth in the Second World War. "Me, I am Dun Horgan. Horgan of the wilderness. Those are my friends you hear, the hairy apes of Afri County."

Orth held out his hand. "Shake," he said, "Horgan. I'm named Orth. I hail from Meadville in Pennsylvania."

"Pennsylvania over that way," and Horgan pointed, "but no village that name. Maybe small?"

Orth nodded. "Small," he agreed wryly. After three million years he wondered that the states retained their original names.

Horgan reached down to jerk an intricately woven necklace of hair, from which depended a crudely carved locket of bone, from the fallen savage's neck.

"Scalp locket is worth fifteen bits bounty," he said offering it to Orth. "It is yours."

Orth shook his head. "No, you keep it. I'll trade it for some food and a bed." He eyed the other thoughtfully.

"And some information too," he added.

Over a well cooked slab of venison and a plate of corn bread, washed down by a muddy brown brew that Horgan served hot and sweetened, they talked. Corn likker the frontiersman called the steaming tasteless fluid when Orth mistakenly named it coffee.

And when they had finished his host produced squares of a fine brown paper which he deftly filled, one-handed, with shredded greenish tobacco, and presented the fat cigar-sized bundles to Orth. He shrugged at the Earthman's refusal, eyeing with amusement the slender whiteness of Orth's own cigarettes.

"Shipped from France maybe," he suggested, "or China?"

Orth handed over the pack. Horgan studied the markings that showed they were manufactured in Kentucky. He shook his head.

"Don't reckon you'll be getting no more," he said. "General Lee ain't been licked yet, and until Washington and Pershing break through to the South...." He lifted his big arms in a half-shrug of doubt.

"What's all this about Lee and Pershing? Some sort of Civil War over again? Or is this continent being invaded?"

Horgan eyed the Earthman curiously. "Maybe I'll have to tell you what year it is," he said dryly, "and who's Boss of the States now. You're powerful ignorant, Orth."

"Go ahead," invited Orth. "My memory's fuzzy."

"This's 1927, June the third." Horgan tugged absent-mindedly at his long brown locks. "Our boss now is Tyad Roosfald. His third year as Boss."

"Teddy Roosevelt." Orth studied his knuckles thoughtfully. "And I suppose General Eisenhower is invading Germany to win our independence!"

"Not Germany," corrected the frontiersman, "but Great Britain. We have accepted Churchill's challenge to land there and fight. Of course the war with Germany and Japan are going on too."

Orth groaned. "What about this other thing—Lee and Washington down South? Don't tell me it's Civil War revival week too. What kind of a gag are you trying to pull on me, Horgan?"

Horgan rubbed a rasping palm thoughtfully along his jaw.

"There is war between the States," he said at last. "Everywhere there is war. The broadcast drums warn us that soon we must fight Cuba." Smoke puffed from his nostrils. "Helping Spain."

One of Orth's hands covered his eyes and he felt his face growing hot with a mingling of anger and bewilderment. He stuttered as he tried to talk. He swallowed smoke and coughed, choking.

"Good afternoon," called a fresh young voice, a feminine voice, from the cabin's rude door.

Their heads twisted smartly toward the opening. Horgan's bared sword was in his fist even before he was on his feet. Together they stood facing the tall round-bodied woman who had walked in upon them. Despite her stature she was remarkably beautiful.

She was pale of skin and her great mass of intricately braided hair was of a softly radiant silver hue. The simple garment of golden-hued cloth covered her adequately—but no more than that. Even her sandals were simple, accessories of comfort and utility rather than fashion.

"I am Ayna of Globe 64BA," she told them briskly. "I wish one or both of you to escort me to Ivath's headquarters."

She was eyeing Orth's zippered shirt and glassid trousers curiously.

"Ivath must be slipping," she said. "You are definitely out of the wrong century. More likely the Twenty-first. I cannot be mistaken for I have majored in Ancient American Mythology."

"I was born in 1960!" Orth snapped, "and I definitely must be in the wrong century. Or I'm out of my head! That's more like it. All this pother about the Civil War and the World Wars going on at the same time. Maybe just the names are the same. Or—what?"

"There must be a short circuiting of your memory cells," said Ayna soothingly, "but Ivath and his helpers will soon set that right. Take me to him and I will help you." She looked at Horgan.

Horgan was shaking his head. "Sorry," he said, "but until the Civil War is ended—here I stay."

The girl frowned. She turned to Orth. "How about you?" she demanded. "Are you part of the local scenery too, or can you travel?"

"I have no idea what this is all about," Orth told her, "but I go where I please. Maybe you can set me right on a few things, Ayna. Then I'll go along with you."

"Fine!" Her teeth flashed.

"I can go with you to Hardpan City," Dun Horgan said slowly. "That's where I trade off my furs and gold dust. We can thump a ride on one of the waggons going to New Yok."

"What are we waiting for then?" demanded Ayna. "Bring extra slugs for your six guns." She looked at Orth. "Don't you have a gun?"

Orth tugged out his compact machine pistol. Apparently the clumsy spring-powered weapons with six barrels were what the girl called six guns, for Horgan belted a second weapon around his waist. The girl examined his hand gun with curious eyes and fingers.

"Unusual design," she commented. "Not authentic for your period costume."

"Come along," said Horgan, cutting across Orth's protesting words. "About time for the afternoon waggon train."

"Here they come!" cried Horgan as they quitted the path for the rutted highway.

He seized a long length of pole and started beating at the road with it. Dust clouded up about them. And further down the road a growing cloud of dust neared. These must be the waggons Horgan was going to hail, Orth decided.

"Why is he pounding the ground, Ayna?" demanded Orth.

The woman laughed. "He is thumping for a ride," she explained. "It is a peculiar custom of this age. In this way he asks assistance."

Orth's dark face reddened with sudden mirth that he choked back. The twisted idiomatic expressions of this strange world were taking a familiar pattern. Even the scrambled pattern of wars and their military leaders began to make sense. Thumping a ride, six shooters, and scalp lockets linked up with Ayna's reference to Ancient American Mythology.

"You're from the little globes clustering around the sun," he said, "and you were visiting Earth—or this primitive duplication of it. Sort of a park for your people, this. Your spacer crashed or you've lost it."

Ayna frowned at Orth. "Yes," she said slowly, "I landed on Earth, contrary to the regulations, and a herd of mammoths wrecked my ship. But how could you, a creature of Ivath's great workship, know anything of spacers?"

"I do not know Ivath," Orth said angrily, "and I came here in a spacer that has vanished.... Now, how do we get out of this make believe world of yours to your home?"

"But this is real," the girl protested. "If a redskin's arrow or a tearunner's slug cuts you down you will die. Until the war is ended, or you take me to Ivath's headquarters, we are not safe."

"All I can say is human beings are as crazy as they were three million years ago," grunted Orth.

Meanwhile the dust cloud rolled closer and slowed. Horgan's thumping had halted them. Orth saw three great waggons, their twenty foot-high metal-tired wheels fitting deep down into the rutted way.

Sixty feet in length they were, and beneath a low roof, that Ayna called a hood, there was a broad treadmill geared up with the eight huge wheels. Between eighty and a hundred thick-bodied little ponies were tied upon this raised moving belt. Above the hood lifted a sort of tower, its roof twenty feet above the ground, and here the two waggon drivers sat, steering the cumbersome vehicle with a spoked wooden wheel.

Back of the cab was the covered cargo deck of the waggon where bags of grain, hides and other produce were heaped.

One of the wooden blocks that had braked the enormous wheels was smoking and now it burst into flame. One of the drivers hastily tossed a bucket of water on the block and put it out.

"Going through Hardpan City?" Horgan asked.

"Climb aboard," cheerfully answered a runty driver with a huge dusty red moustache. He jabbed his thumb at the ladder bolted to the waggon's side.

"You ride this waggon," Horgan said to Ayna and Orth. "I'll hop the next one."

The red-moustached man helped them into the cab, his squinted pale eyes studying the girl appreciatively, and then he spoke to his hulking companion. This driver was a hairy apish giant without ears. Now he slowly released the brakes that locked the treadmill while Red Moustache freed the wheels.

The treadmill revolved faster and faster and they went clanking and bumping off down the highroad, the miniature horses sweating in their involuntary struggle to keep on their feet. The great hooded vehicle had a pace of perhaps ten miles an hour.

"I hear," shouted the little driver at Orth and Ayna, "that the Boss is sending a hundred men to New Yok soon. They're to hunt down the red jitterbugs and outlaws that range the highways."

He paused long enough to catch his breath and curse the thick fog of dust that filled the cab.

"A hundred soldiers to wipe out three or four thousand tea sellers and their gunmen!" He snorted. "Of course they're jeep men—Hoovers, you know—but they can't do any good."

"The Boss is all wise," said the earless man, bumping his clenched fist against his nose. "He is the Boss."

Orth turned to Ayna. "Now," he said, "who is Ivath?"

The girl shrugged. "For a creation of Ivath's laboratories," she said, "you are refreshingly human. So I will treat you as one of us." Her eyes were thoughtful. "After all a robot does possess a limited power of reasoning."

"Ivath!" Orth barked the word at her. "Forget the insults for the time being. I may look funny but I'm human."

"Ivath is the director of our theater of space," she said. "This, as you know, is a huge hollow globe on whose surface world-wide dramas from the ages past are brought to life. He is painstakingly accurate in his depiction of the bygone dress, customs and speech."

Orth laughed shortly. "Even to vehicles with horses for power," he said, "and guns without gunpowder."

The girl disregarded him. "But Ivath has surpassed other directors of the past. He uses androids, living robots, and impresses on their memory cells the accurate thought and instinct patterns of their own chosen age. It is really amazing how closely their actions follow the historical patterns of the ancient past."

"You mean he sprinkles cities, forests and—robots, all around and watches what happens? No script for them to follow? No deadline or time to end it all?"

"He usually changes the entire surface of the globe every fifty years," Ayna told him. "The next drama will be that of ancient Mars before the Earthmen came, and shortly afterward."

"If it is as accurate as this mess," said Orth dryly, "it will be something to see, and worse to hear. I lived in the years of the first Martian exploration, Ayna. And I came from the Twentieth Century that your director is supposed to be presenting here!"

Ayna's face was serious. Orth felt a curious prickling sensation in his head and then everything went hazy for a time....

Eventually the blur faded. He found that they had left the forest behind and were entering a region of cultivated fields and little huddles of log and sod dwellings. The clumsy vehicle in which they sat was slowing until it was barely crawling between two rows of brick-fronted cabins.

"You are not lying," Ayna said. "I probed your mind, Devin Orth. You are not an android. And I believe that your space ship has been seized by Ivath. It was an alien object on the vast canvas of his pictured world."

"Here's Hardpan," Red Moustache said, leering slack-jawed at Ayna. "Sorry you couldn't go along to New Yok," he added to Orth, "you and your squirt. She's some fowl."

Orth choked and gulped twice. He thanked the driver and climbed down the ladder. Horgan was already standing in the shadow of a doorway above which swung a dust-grimed sign. Two Drik Tony's, the sign read.

"Wait for us in that store," said Horgan, pointing out a door across the street that was flanked by barrels of fruit and other produce. "Orth and me needs a drink."

Orth started to protest and then desisted as he saw the girl's eyelid twitch and her head motion toward the door. He followed the frontiersman. Ayna was talking softly to herself as they left her.

They joined the men bellied up to the bar. Dun Horgan ordered two shots of alcohol which were brought to them in shallow saucers of glass. Horgan dropped three bits on the bar.

"How about a shot of tea?" he whispered to the bartender.

The man's flabby pink face whitened. Imperceptibly he nodded toward the back room and scooped up the three shining coins. The two men downed their fiery drinks and then elbowed their way toward the closed door.

"It's this accursed Volsad Law," said Horgan. "All a result of the Boston tea runners. Tried to smuggle it in and then the reform crowd took it up. Blamed tea for crime and poverty. Pushed the laws through outlawing its sale."

Orth grinned. "So now the bootleggers, or tealeggers, maybe, are getting rich."

Horgan nodded. Inside the door the bartender met them and slipped a small bottle of cold tea into Horgan's pocket. Then he motioned toward the half-open door leading into the alley beyond.

"Please," he said. "There may be jeep men watching my bar."

They quitted the building and leaving the alley reached the main street. Ayna was waiting in the store's door and as she saw them she started to walk in their direction.

A bony stoop-shouldered man with a naked skull beneath his droopy-brimmed hat lurched into her path. His sunken dark eyes were bloodshot and hot. He jerked her arm.

"Looking for someone?" he demanded. "I'm here."

Ayna's fist landed flush on the man's jaw. He staggered back, but still gripped her. Orth seized the man's shoulder and spun him about. With the same movement his other fist crashed the bony man backward for several paces.

But he had not been alone. With him were three other hard-faced men. They helped him to his feet and came pacing toward Orth and Horgan. Their hands were inching down toward their big holstered spring guns. Orth reached for his own hand machine gun, and with his movement their four enemies went for their own weapons.

Horgan was slapping his bolts at the quartet. Ayna was hugging the dirty street. Orth felt one smashing impact before his weapon started sewing the explosive little pellets across the four men's middles. Pain was just starting to throb in his left elbow when the last of the others slumped, dead, into the dusty street. Horgan staggered toward him, a six gun bolt in his right side.

"Just nicked me," he said calmly, his hand holding back the blood that seeped through his coarse-woven shirt.

Orth found it hard to believe that these fallen men were actually but pseudo-men, robots. Their laboratory-given life blood was as red and sticky as a true man's, and their dying struggles were as realistic as his own might have been.

The bartender came sidling up to Orth. He was but one of a score of muttering, staring onlookers.

"Better clear outta town," he advised. "Krepp's brother is sheriff. And if he don't hang you Krepp's mob will do you up."

"Thanks," Orth said. There were a dozen horses, saddled and bridled, drooping at a nearby hitchrail, and toward these he moved.

"Come on," he told Horgan and Ayna. "We're riding out of here."

Horgan shrugged. "Might as well get neckties for rustling a horse as for killing Krepp," he conceded, reloading his two spring guns.

They climbed into the saddles, Orth snapping a warning burst of explosive slugs into the road and Horgan menacing the glowering knot of townspeople and riders, and went riding eastward out of the village street.

Once they were free of the town and climbing a long easy grade into the low tree-clad hills the men of Hardpan City organized their pursuit. Orth saw horses, light waggons, and high-wheeled vehicles resembling bicycles come streaming up the highway after them.

Drums began to boom all along the cleared valley they had left and in the hills ahead.

"News broadcasters," Horgan informed him, "warning all cruising scout waggons and squad carts of our escape. Their squad carts are fast—they have pulley drives that can be shifted. If we can only reach the forests again...."

"We'll make it," Orth said. He grinned encouragingly at Ayna. "Maybe we'll find your precious Ivath, too," he added.

At that moment they were riding up a short grade, tree-lined and stony, beyond which they could see nothing but an endless stretch of undulating tree-tops. Nothing, Orth was thinking, could now keep them from achieving safety.

Suddenly the ground swayed underfoot and their horses spilled them from the saddles.

There was a moment of rushing blackness, as though they were falling into a pit of tar, and then they felt themselves being whirled horizontally along for a time into a blurring twilight, only to slide softly to a stop.

Orth heard a click and a whir from somewhere above him and saw a vast square section of grayness detach itself from the sky above and disappear. He lay quietly for a long minute but the ground was solid underfoot and so he stood up.

"That," said Ayna, laughing rather breathlessly, "was some of Ivath's work. He's brought this section of the crust inside for repairs." She hesitated. "Or perhaps because of you, Devin Orth."

"Me? I get it. If he took the Time Bubble this same way.... Yeah."

Orth swallowed thickly. No telling what the mysterious Ivath might be planning to do with them. He was glad Ayna was along. She knew this insane future world.

"Here he comes now," said Ayna, low-voiced. "Ivath, I mean. And, by the way, he is my great grandfather. So don't mind him too much."

Orth found himself looking at a transparent bubble of plastic, with a puffy over-sized belt of jade-green metal fixed about its middle. It floated a few feet above the ground, sparks buzzing faintly as it dropped too low and was forced upward again.

Inside there was a bony little parody of a man's body, or rather, its upper torso. Below the arms there was nothing save a shining metallic cylinder. The huge blue-veined skull was supported by soft wide bands of plastic material, and the bony arms rested on cushioned ledges.

"Greetings, Earthman," something inside his brain seemed to say. "I have your fellows here, my honored guests. You will join them."

"They are here, my companions?" asked Orth stupidly. "You mean Horn and Neilson? Did you say that to me?"

"He speaks only in thoughts," said Ayna. "When our people reach the age of two hundred they submit to this operation. With their lungs gone there is, of course, no vocal speech. But we live on for centuries untroubled by bodily breakdowns."

Ivath motioned with his feeble old arms.

"Come," he flashed at them, "we will join them."

As they sat in a small spacer cruising within the vast hollow of Ivath's world-sized stage, Ayna explained more of the mysteries of this future world. How the planets had been cut up into smaller spheres and moved into the dwindling radiations of Sol. How their fleets of space ships crossed the void to trade and mine the precious elements they required, and of the other galactic cultures they met.

"It is sad," said the girl at last, "that you can never return to the past. It is there that our science has utterly failed. Travel in time is but a one-way voyage."

"You mean, Ayna," Orth said slowly, "we can't carry back the knowledge of an atomic shield that will arrest the spread of sterility—that mankind must abandon his use of atomic power?"

"You cannot go back," smiled Ayna, putting her hand on his shoulder as she spoke. "But there is no need. In 1980—if our records are not too wrong—Eric Ensamoff discovered such a shield."

"Great!" cried Orth. "I won't mind being stranded here. There's Ivath to set right on his ancient history. There's your perfected civilization to study." He swallowed his tongue momentarily and recovered it.

"And then there's you, Ayna," he blurted. "You're...."

The girl slid her fingers across a toggle-switch in the wall. "No use letting all the worlds hear us," she said softly, "much less see us. You see, I was sent to interview you and get your reactions. All the world was watching while you explored."

Orth took the girl and pulled her closer. He studied her face. She smiled.

"Sure it's turned off?" he demanded. She nodded.

"Fine ... no, they don't need to see this reaction...."

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